A day after the Beginning of its Fundraising Campaign, Romanian Medtech Startup Oncochain has raised €195K

The Timisoara medtech startup Oncochain has been listed on SeedBlink and it aims to raise a total of €350K. The round is led by the Cleverage VC investment fund that will invest €130K and €220K of the whole amount will be gathered through equity crowdfunding, by selling around 8.3% of the company equity. One day after the start of their campaign, Oncochain have managed to raise €195K from 17 investors.

Since the launch of the startup at the beginning of 2019, the company has received an investment of around €80K. From the data above, it becomes clear that the post-money valuation of Oncochain will be roughly €2.65M. The company has been developing a data collection and analysis platform for oncology research. “The doctors we work with, especially those who are very interested in the research part, told us that they are extremely excited that they finally have a product to help them collect clinical data correctly and efficiently. Our goal is to create a framework for quality multicenter research that can help all those involved in the patient management,” says Roxana Margan, co-founder and chief operating officer of Oncochain.

A Centralized Platform

The eponymous platform – Oncochain – operates using data collected from daily clinical practice and turns it into statistical analyzes. The statistical data is then provided to doctors, research institutes, and pharmaceutical companies so that they can use it during research on different types of cancer. 

Currently, 97% of patients worldwide have data on their oncological disease within the fragmented medical record systems. Important clinical data about disease etiology, treatments, impact, or outcomes, is either inaccessible or incomplete. According to company officials, this is a part of the reason why scientists are unable to progress against cancer. 

Oncochain is intended to be a centralized, easily accessible platform. The idea of the platform involves the development of 2 apps. The first one, the Oncochain Electronical Health Record (EHR), can be used by healthcare providers. The app includes web-based oncology electronic health record with the latest classification standards for diagnosis and procedures. The second app, the Oncochain Analytics Tool, is used by pharmaceutical companies and CROs and offers on-demand access to aggregated clinical data and analytics that can be used by researchers and epidemiologists to compare clinical cohorts and assess the outcomes from a particular treatment. 

“If we succeed in reducing the time to market of a new molecule from ten to eight years, it is enormous. Thus, patients will have faster access to treatments and, practically, lives are saved. This is the vision: that people have better treatments, in a shorter time and with lower costs,” adds Margan. 

Expansion into Eastern Europe

According to company officials, the expected revenue at the end of next year is €30K per month. The money is to come from subscription fees from providers/clinics for Oncochain EHR as well as from fees paid by pharmaceuticals companies, CROs, and academia for Oncochain’s SaaS (software as a service) tool. The calculations are based on estimations of the value of 1 full anonymized cancer patient record (between $1 and $1.5K for the USA.) According to data provided by Oncochain, the overall market for healthcare analytics is expected to reach $50.5 billion by 2024 at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 28.3% during the forecast period. In addition, the total Addressable Market (TAM) for healthcare analytics is evaluated at $14 billion, Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is $3,3 billion for oncology and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is at around $810 million.

Oncochain’s plans for next year are to work with 25 cancer clinics and attract 6 pharmaceutical companies as customers. Another goal is to gather 25 000 medical records that will be used for research on the platform. In terms of market expansion, Oncochain would like to cover 50% of Romania’s academic and private oncological centers. 

For 2022, the company also aims at entering Eastern European markets such as Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, and Poland. By 2025, Oncochain plans to enter countries like Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, as the investments in the medical field and the oncology medication are expected to increase rapidly.